Kids and guns, lock them up...the guns that is, not the kids

You know, a quick Google search yielded a plethora of pics with babies with guns that I could have used in this post...but the tragic nature of the material means that you will just have to read it straight up.

A sad story here in Central Ohio of a 3 year old that shot himself in the head with a .45 and died. The toddler's mother on 911 told the dispatcher it was on top if the TV where he "where he usually can't reach it" (sic).  Now a toddler is dead in what the Knox County Sheriff is calling "an unfortunate accident" - what I would call a negligent homicide.  The family will grieve and then I am sure face some type of judicial punishment for such a lackadaisical manner of securing firearms.  From the article...

The dispatcher asked Campbell how the toddler got the gun.“I don’t know if he climbed up ...,” Campbell said before trailing off. She continued: “ Oh, my God, he so knows better. He’s never touched a gun before. Never ever has he ever messed with a gun. He’s always known better.”
She said the gun was atop the television, “where he usually can’t reach it.”

"He knows better?"  The boy was 3 freaking years old! Come on, common sense folks.  Three year olds get bigger to where they can reach things they couldn't before, they are inquisitive, they climb and they touch....touch things they shouldn't!  Yes, at some point children should be taught about firearms and how to treat them with respect, in no way does that include keeping a loaded firearm around them to find for themselves and then have this happen!

I feel sorry for this little boy now deprived of a live that now goes unfulfilled.  Maybe its just me getting older and realizing that there may be more road behind me than in front of me, but when I see or hear about something like this where a child is killed needlessly by stupidity I cringe a bit.  

Use them as needed...

I really hate to have to say it, but if you have kids in the home and firearms you need to secure them from their grasp in some manner that provides a barrier to the operation of the weapon.  Whether that barrier be a cable lock (required to be given with the purchase of of a firearm, at least here in Ohio), a locked room or a $2000 firearm safe...you need to keep the kids away from the guns until they are old enough and mature enough to be trained in their use.  Even then, everything they do with a firearm until they are adults is still on your shoulders as a parent.   In the Huey household the golden rule is that if a firearm is not on me or in my direct line of sight to supervise that it is locked up or disabled by way of a cable or other such locking device.  And woe to me if Household-6 would ever catch me breaking this prime directive.

Just so my walk follows my talk...to the right you will notice a new logo that will connect you to Project Childsafe, a project run by the National Shooting Sports Foundation that provides education and safety kits for firearm owners to help prevent tragedies like this from happening. Yes, their locks have come under fire for being easy to defeat according to some...but if you have kids that are old enough and sophisticated enough to be using bump keys and the like you need to invest in a safe and put it behind a locked door as well as having a sit down with them to discuss firearm safety.   But in the case above, I doubt a 3 year old would of been able to defeat any of the cable locks I have at home to operate the weapon that killed him.

Yes, making a firearm hard to access also means that it is hard to get to in an emergency when it might be needed for use in defense, I understand that position.   But it seems like far to many kids (at least here in the Buckeye State) fall victim to "accidental" shootings that could have been prevented with just a bit of common sense being applied. 

Sorry to go on what would almost seem an anti-gun rant, but unfortunately, common sense is not necessarily a common virtue.